US weighs Kim's fighting words

North Korea Harriet Alexander Raf Sanchez

When Kim Jong-un's government declared on Saturday that the ''time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle'', and said relations with South Korea were ''at the state of war'', it was not taken lightly.

''We take these threats seriously and remain in close contact with our South Korean allies,'' a White House National Security Council spokeswoman said.

China appealed for calm, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: ''We can simply see the situation getting out of control.''

It is tempting to dismiss the noise from Pyongyang as sabre-rattling. South Korea elected a new prime minister last month, providing the North with an opportunity to flex its muscles. ''Since 1992, the North has welcomed these five new leaders by disturbing the peace,'' wrote Victor Cha and David Kang in Foreign Policy.

The peninsula is one of the most heavily armed military flashpoints in the world, and the North has frequently shown its willingness to push confrontations to the brink.

Military experts are sceptical that the North could launch the attacks they threaten. Narushige Michishita, of Japan's National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, is not convinced North Korea could attack Guam, Hawaii or the US mainland. But its Rodong missiles, with a range of about 1300 kilometres, could reach US bases in Japan, he says.

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Asia-Pacific editor for Jane's Defence Weekly James Hardy said: ''We know they want intercontinental ballistic missiles, but don't know whether they have them. They have managed to reverse-engineer Soviet Scud missiles, and, certainly, could attack South Korea and Japan with those. But Scuds are very inaccurate''.

But real concerns remain. Three years ago, the North launched a surprise attack on the South, sinking a ship and killing 46 sailors. Eight months later, the North fired dozens of shells at a border island.

Even more worrying are its nuclear tests, the most recent of which, on February 12, was double the size of previous ones, and led to a new round of UN sanctions.

Kim, the North's 30-year-old ''Supreme Leader'', is still an unknown quantity. The question is who is actually running the country: Kim or its powerful generals?

With the world's fourth largest military, counting almost 1.2 million personnel, North Korea's generals wield immense power.

On Saturday, the North warned it would shut the Kaesong industrial complex - factories inside its border with the South with workers from both sides, and the last main symbol of Korean co-operation.

The declaration of war used bellicose language, raging against the US and vowing ''it will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war''.

It continued: ''They should clearly know that in the era of Marshal Kim Jong-un, the greatest-ever commander, all things are different from what they used to be in the past.''

Analysts believe the North could launch 500,000 rounds of artillery on the South in the first hour of an attack.

But around the Itaewon base in Seoul - headquarters for 28,500 US soldiers - the atmosphere was calm. ''We're not even on alert,'' said one US officer.